As much time and hassle as it saves me, handling my accounts online isn’t completely free of drawbacks. Although I may provoke a flurry of patronizing tsk-tsking from the online-security paranoiacs, the drawbacks I’m going to address don’t have to do with whatever chance might exist of my identity being stolen. I’m talking about the unwanted extra email that so many of my online accounts continually send me, no matter how many times I “unsubscribe” from these “special offers and information for account holders,” or whatever the euphemism may be.
Let’s illustrate this bitch. On my Citi/AT&T Universal Card, I signed up as per usual for the “paperless” option—online statements, online auto-payments, emailed confirmations thereof, and emailed notices in case of any problems with limits or payment processing. When I selected these services, I was careful to specify my desire to receive no other emails from the credit card other than these specific statement and payment notices. Nevertheless, here is a junk email I received from them this morning. Read the rest of this entry »
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Spam Bots: Flattery Will Almost Get You Everywhere
November 22, 2009 | 3 comments
Credit: hegarty_david (Flickr)
Throughout the nearly four years of this blog’s existence, the Akismet plugin has consistently kept C&B free of comment spam. As I understand it, what Akismet does with my blog comments is pretty much the same thing that spam filters do with your email inbox. There is one difference, though, at least in my experience.
I use Gmail, and I’d estimate that maybe four or five spam emails per month manage to sneak past Gmail’s filters and get to my inbox. No big deal. Once or twice a month I scroll quickly through my Gmail spam folder to check for false positives, and there normally are one or two. Pretty good spam blocking overall, wouldn’t you say? Me too.
Well, get this: in the history of this blog, I cannot recall even once finding a false positive in my Akismet comment spam queue. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: blogging, comment spam, Gmail, Google, spam